Meet Jason DeMarco, The Reason Adult Swim’s Music Is So Good

Since the mp3 landed on the record business like an atomic bomb nearly two decades ago, artists and the industry alike have remained in a state of flux over how to make music and money. The result is that some of music’s most prolific funders aren’t record labels at all, but corporations looking to jack a little brand swag from what the kids are listening to. Some of these collaborations have been distasteful (SXSW’s Doritos stage, the Sour Patch Kids house), but others have given marginalized artists a major signal boost they might never have received otherwise (Red Bull Music Academy, Ray Ban’s Boiler Room collaboration).

Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network has been one of the good ones. Its popular Adult Swim programming block has long supported independent artists that few other cable behemoths would find practical use for, from sci-fi lullaby crooner Helado Negro to the experimental composer J.G. Thirlwell. The late-night slate of shows buys beats for promos and bumps, as well as licenses entire catalogs from indie labels for a yearly sync fee. Adult Swim even tried to function as a proper record label, Williams Street Records, which released albums from Killer Mike and Cerebral Ballzy alongside music from Adult Swim shows like “The Venture Bros.” and “Metalocalypse.” They’ve since transitioned from selling music to giving it away: For the past five years, the Adult Swim Singles Program has licensed new or unreleased tracks from artists that span the spectrum of genre, from Flying Lotus and Tanya Tagaq to Death Grips and Diarrhea Planet. This year, the program took a huge leap by expanding from 31 to 52 straight weeks of free weekly songs, in addition to dropping DOOM’s new album over the course of 14 weeks.

Behind the scenes of all of this is Adult Swim’s Senior Vice President and Creative Director of On-Air Jason DeMarco, whose own taste formed the basis of programming’s distinctly left-of-center musical approach. Responsible for producing everything on Adult Swim that isn’t a show or third-party ad, DeMarco distributes cash to (mostly) independent artists and labels in service of soundtracking and promoting Adult Swim’s content. In the process, he has quietly become one of the music industry’s most influential tastemakers. DeMarco also introduced Killer Mike and El-P years back, which means in a way that you can thank him for Run the Jewels.

We caught up with DeMarco recently, calling from his home base of Atlanta, to discuss Adult Swim’s role in the music industry and the tenets of responsible corporate patronage.

Pitchfork: The music on Adult Swim has been a huge part of its identity for almost as long as it’s existed. Is there an origin story for its musical ID?

Jason DeMarco: We kinda had to find our way a little bit, just like any new venture. When Adult Swim started, the whole point was to keep it as cheap as possible, so we used Turner library music. There are tons of music libraries that television networks license that are just anonymous artists making music that sounds like somebody else. The guys that made the on-air content and the bumps at the time were getting tired of sifting through tons of mediocre music to find the three or four good tracks in the library. They asked, “Man, can anyone just get us some music? Can you help us figure this out?” For years, I had been buying beats from people like Danger Mouse for Toonami [Cartoon Network’s action-cartoon programming block]. So through relationships I had with Ninja Tune, and later Warp, and then Ghostly, and now Hyperdub and a bunch of others like Brainfeeder, we go to those labels and make deals to use music from their artists in exchange for a yearly fee. It was a way to go to an independent label that normally wouldn’t get this kind of exposure and money and offer them that in exchange for us being able to use their catalog on our air. Between that and me buying original music from people like Flying Lotus and Clams Casino, we developed our on-air feel.

How did you get from buying beats for promos to Williams Street Records to the Adult Swim Singles Program?

Williams Street Records came out of the Danger Doom project [Danger Mouse and MF DOOM’s 2005 album, The Mouse and the Mask]. We put that out on Epitaph Records, it did really well, sold like 350,000 copies. And we didn’t, frankly, see that much money because we made a dumb deal with Epitaph. We didn’t know how records worked. At the time, Warner Bros. Records was part of our company, so we had a publishing arm, we had everything. The idea was to see if we could set up a label with a very small stuff and run it like an indie, but be a part of a giant company. Which was a doomed idea. Turner exists to make money, like any company. So they were looking at it like an experiment, to see if it could become profitable. It really didn’t need to be a huge profit, it just needed to pay for itself, like anything. And it did for a while, but as the music business fell apart, we didn’t really have the type of infrastructure it needed to be launched. So eventually the decision was made to keep it open as sort of a marketing arm and release the music for free. People like the music we release, but we just aren’t a real record label so we’re not really able to monetize it. And frankly, real record labels are barely able to monetize it, so...

The Singles Program came out of the Williams Street label. The person who was running the label at the time, Amantha Walden—I was the A&R—she and I both talked about this idea: What if we released a single every month, as part of a Williams Street record club? But we could never get it off the ground in a realistic way. Part of my job as head of on-air is coming up with sales promotions for advertisers, and I thought, “Why don’t we try this idea but do it once a week, for six to 10 weeks? And maybe bring a client onboard and they can pay for it, so we can give money to artists and simultaneously do this music thing.” The metric for success originally was just, “We’re gonna spend money to make this thing, so we need to bring on an advertiser to offset the cost and make it worth doing.” Which we did. I think Kia was the sponsor the first three years. Then it did really well: It got a lot of positive press and a lot of downloads—which, ’cause this was seven years ago, downloads were still the primary thing people did.

Fun fact: The budget’s been the same for seven years, but the music has changed, and every year, through better relationships with artists, through all kinds of ways, I’ve been able to stretch that money further. This year we have 52 weeks of the Singles Program, and they’re streaming only. Streams are way cheaper than downloads, in terms of getting rights. So that allows us to finally do my dream, which was always get this to be a full year.

You guys seem to be one of the progenitors of a growing trend of corporate patronage, with brands like Converse, Red Bull, and even Sour Patch Kids offering logistical and financial support to artists with various conditions.

There is, I agree. I’ve known people at other companies who do the things that I do, and I’ve been on panels with them. And I can tell you that it’s almost universally someone like me, who works at a company, that just has a crazy passion for music, and whose bosses have given them the rope to spend some of their corporate money on an attempt to engage an audience with music. Of course, music is such an easy lifestyle-branding thing, because obviously musicians are always among the tier of cool things in the world. They always will be, and they always have been. So identifying with anyone who kids think is cool is ultimately something any brand is gonna want to do. But it can’t be done thoughtlessly. And it usually is.

You mentioned Converse and Red Bull, and I think they’re two of the [companies] that did it right. I believe Converse is walking back on theirs, because I don’t think they supported it well enough, to tell you the truth. The reason that anyone knows that Adult Swim has a music thing is because we’ve been doing it for 15 straight years and never slowed down, and only actually increased. You have to do it that long to make an impact that people associate your brand with it, you really do. You can’t be impatient and throw a bunch of money at it. Honestly, I think Red Bull is the only other company [besides Adult Swim] doing it really right. They’re doing the Red Bull Music Academy, allowing musicians platforms to talk about their process and all kinds of other stuff that is way beyond like, “Oh, here’s a free track!” I think there’s value to that, too, because that’s what we do. Those two approaches give musicians a platform or some cash that they might not get otherwise.

The idea of “selling out” might be almost obsolete, but even so, no one seems to levy such accusations at Adult Swim, despite the corporate overlords.

I feel that it’s harder than ever to make a living as an artist, and if, as a person who has a very steady job at a company, I can help that artist by giving them funding that they’re not getting from traditional methods of distribution, then as long as I’m not asking them to do anything they disagree with morally and they don’t think my company is gross, to me there’s not much of a downside. Of course, there are artists who have a very strict policy of never collaborating with a corporation, but every situation’s different and every artist has their own sensibility of where they’re willing to go. The second you start asking an artist to go out there and be a huckster [for your brand], the second it becomes more than a collaboration between two like-minded entities, then it feels false, immediately, to everyone. Luckily, with Adult Swim, we make things and people fall in love with them, so when I’m reaching out to musicians a lot of times, they like Adult Swim. One thing about us, whether you’re in or you’re out, you can turn our channel on for five minutes and you know exactly what we’re about. A lot of people can tell there’s a point of view, and maybe they look at the music we’ve released and see that someone there cares in some way. The artists who’ve worked with us have been treated well and have told other artists about it. But that takes time, and most corporations do not have the patience. I’ve been incredibly lucky that Adult Swim is letting me do this for so long. That’s the only way it’s been able to be so successful.